Saturday, November 16, 2019; Transiting the Suez Canal

Saturday, November 16, 2019; Transiting the Suez Canal

Coincidentally, Ben got up at 4:30AM to use the bathroom just as the ship heaved anchor and proceeded in the darkness down the approach channel for the Suez Canal, marked by red and green navigation marker lights.  There were small harbor pilot vessels zooming up and down the channel to either side of the Sapphire Princess.  At one point, we had 4 or 5 of them holding a formation off our port side, unloading pilots and customs officials.  There wasn’t much to see of the Suez Canal aside from several lighted structures on the shore and what looked like salt evaporation ponds on our starboard side and some container ship cranes on the shores to our port side.  There were probably 200 or so passengers up on the top of the pilot house to witness our actual entry into the Suez Canal.  As the sun slowly rose over the horizon, we could see the African continent off our starboard side and the Arabian Peninsula of Asia off our port side.  There appears to be a variety of industries scattered along the Suez Canal with a surprising amount of agriculture in what we had anticipated would be desert.  There are lots of green plots of vegetables as well as palm tree plantations.  

There are a few interesting concessions to the political environment, including a border wall that would make Donald Trump salivate.  It runs parallel nearly the entire length of the canal with manned guard towers every quarter mile or so.  There are also “Ready to Launch” pontoon bridge sections that can span the canal every couple of miles, in case someone might need to drive a division of tanks over to the other side on short notice.  

There are a few large cities along the canal.  There is a single cable suspension bridge that spans the canal continuously that is oddly enough called the Egyptian-Japanese Friendship Bridge, even though it doesn’t span Egypt and Japan.  It is at El-Qantara (literally translated as The Bridge) and links the African to the Asian continents.  Passing under it was reminiscent of passing under the Bridge of the Americas or the Centennial Bridges over the Panama Canal, although the desert is quite a contrast to the jungles of Panama.  

There are also two other interesting bridges.  One is a railroad bridge that has two spans that rotate across the canal, linking at the center of the channel when a train needs to pass between vessel traffic.  The other is a floating vehicle bridge that pivots out across the canal between vessel traffic to accommodate cars and truck.  There are innumerable ferries that also carry cars, truck and passengers across the channel.  These have to dart in and out between the vessels traversing the length of the canal.

There is a wide buffer between the cities and the canal.  The only people we could see from the ship were the soldiers manning the various guard towers and guard stations, and construction workers working on various projects along the canal.  There are quite a few fishermen working in 2’s and 3’s from rowed boats with nets. Fish apparently use the canal to migrate from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.  

There are irrigation canals that run perpendicular to the Suez Canal.  These feed the crops, but I’m not sure where the fresh water originates.  We saw a bunch of donkeys being loaded up with barrels of water near one of these.  

There is a large salt water lake that spans the middle of the man made sections called the Bitter Lakes.  There are lots of birds that migrate through these and the canal.  We saw gulls diving on fish alongside the ship.  

We had breakfast on our balcony, which was quite comfortably on the shaded side of the ship as it made it’s way southbound during the morning.  The temperature was 75 degrees, and there was little wind with the ship working its way through the canal.  The sky had light high cloud cover with a full sun.  

We met up with our trivia team for the morning trivia, and finished in our customary one or two points off the lead.  On a lark, we decided to attend the mid-day Egyptian Mythology trivia.  The cruise staffer who hosted it said a group had approached her after the first trivia on Greek and Roman mythology and specifically requested on on Egyptian mythology, so someone was more or less an Egyptian mythology enthusiast.  We, on the other hand, knew absolutely nothing about it.  We looked at a Wikipedia list of Egyptian gods, but learned that they have over 4000 gods and they are different from one city to another, so we figured we’d attend and maybe learn a thing or two.  When it can time for the quiz, it was hilariously obvious that we could only blindly guess on most of the questions, trying to pull a few names out of our memories from the morning’s cram session and praying for multiple choice questions.  We figured whomever had requested this would have a perfect 15/15 score.  When the grading was done, we had somehow managed to guess our way to a 7/15 score.  When it came time to reveal scores, we were absolutely dumbfounded to discover that we had beat the next highest score by 1/2 point and actually won that trivia by the seat of our pants.  

After a relaxing lunch in the dining room and nap, we hit the afternoon trivia and finished in second place with a score of 19/20.  We got tripped on what a “Mississippi Saxophone” is.  We had considered either clarinet or harmonica, and went with clarinet since that’s what’s in most Dixieland band combos, but it turned out to be the harmonica.  

We walked the promenade, and after dinner, we had our last Trivia for the day, A Disney Trivia.  Two of our usual team had dinner at that time, but we were able to recruit two girls who had come into the lounge by themselves.  They were sisters from near Fairbanks traveling with family.  It was fun and strategically helpful to have them, but we were beat out by another team who likewise had some new young recruits.  

We finished up our day with an illusionist show.  He relied heavily on the state of the art stage effects that Princess Theater provides, and his illusions were all pedestrian tricks that all magicians do, so it was all predictable, but well performed.  In general, it takes something quite innovative to make a magic or illusionist show interesting, but we still can’t figure out how the tricks are done.

An announcement was made over the PA at lunch saying that a medical emergency had developed and a passenger was going to require a medical evacuation.  Fortunately, the rendezvous is a port in Egypt along our route, so it won’t effect our itinerary, but the ship will be making an unscheduled stop at 2AM, and then punching the throttle up to stay on schedule.  Tomorrow is another day at sea as we work our way around the Sinai Peninsula to get to Aqaba, Jordan. We have seen security preparations unique to this itinerary.  The ship is equipped with FLIR cameras forward and at all corners, and there is a security officer now hanging out on the fantail with a box of equipment including night vision and what looks like some sort of audio device.  There are high pressure hoses rigged up all up and down the promenade deck that would be used to either knock pirates off or flood their boats. We are also traveling in a convoy of boats and something tells me more than just a pilot and customs agent boarded our ship from those 4 or 5 pilot boats that rendezvoused with us during the early morning hours. Hopefully, none of this will prove to be necessary, but even in ancient times, the coast of Egypt on the Red Sea was known as the Pirate Coast.